Scrolling through Facebook recently, I discovered NYCMidnight, which hosts writing competitions for those of us who fancy ourselves storytellers. I found it just in time to enter the Flash Fiction Challenge in July of 2019, and now I’m hooked. The way it works is: All entrants are assigned a group (depending on the challenge, there could be 30-50 writers per group), and each group is assigned a prompt. For Flash Fiction, we were given a genre, a location, and an object and had 48 hours to write a 1,000-word story. That was my first time to enter such a contest, and my first time to write fiction in many years. (I mean, how many adults with full-time jobs have the luxury of time to write fiction stories for fun?) However, I did a decent job, according to the judges, and placed within the top 15 in the first two rounds. It wasn’t enough, though, to get me through to the third round, so I left Flash Fiction with the humble understanding that it was the experience that was important: the judges’ feedback, the very active online forums, and the encouragement of family and friends who read my stories along the way.

My performance in the next contest was much better. Microfiction! This time, we were given a genre, an action, and a word, and had 24 hours to write a 250-word story (which is basically a scene). My story in Round 1 placed first, so I will share it with you in this blog. The top 10 writers moved on to the second round and were assigned a new genre, action, and word. This time, only the top five would advance … and I placed sixth. While that was a huge bummer, I’m still really proud of placing at all (50-something writers in each group), so I will also share my Round 2 story later in this blog.

Most recently, I entered the Short Story Challenge. I was assigned a genre, a subject, and a character and had 8 days to write a 2,500-word story. I won’t find out until April if I placed (and only the top 5 in each group advance), but what a fun ride this has been. It is quite therapeutic to think creatively and write fiction, especially in genres that stretch my creative muscles.

So, without further ado, I will post my Microfiction stories.